Saturday, July 12, 2014

…saturated with memories, associations, tracks and traces, more layers than a medieval palimpsest, unstable boundaries…I took pains excavating those layers in Little Dorrit (dss chapter) but don't manage so well writing about my own personal places, falling back on images, links to the efforts of others…this blog…

It's impossible to write about place.

I was chatting with my friend Ian the other day and he mentioned in passing, "writing is impossible." We had been talking about how hard it really is to write clear coherent prose. It is. Difficult, I mean. Just try following your thoughts and sensations for five minutes, and putting them into neat prose.

Then you add a topic, or god forbid a 'theme', and it gets harder still. Focus, attention, word by word, sentence to paragraph. Logical propositions. What was I talking about again?